Page 4 of Tangled Up with the Firefighter

“I know.” She pauses. “I’ve just never seen it.”

I don’t know what to say to that. I’ve done this a hundred times. Walk into a space where something is going wrong, find the source, fix it, walk out. It’s the job. It’s what I trained for and what I chose and what I do every shift without thinking about whether anyone is watching.

She’s watching now. And the way she’s looking at me, standing on the sidewalk with her garden shears and her pollen-dusted apron, is doing something to the settled place inside me where I put things that don’t fit.

“You have…” She reaches up and touches the side of my jaw. One fingertip, quick and light. “Soot.”

The touch lasts maybe half a second. Her fingertip is cool and smells like stems—like green things—and when she pulls her hand back, I can still feel where she was.

“Thank you,” I say, which is not the right response when someone wipes soot off your face, but it’s what comes out.

She almost smiles. It doesn’t fully form, but I can see it building, and then she steps back and looks at the shears in her hand like she just realized she’s holding them.

“I should get back,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“Your flowers will be ready Friday.”

“Friday. Noon.”

She turns and walks back toward the Trading Post. I watch her go. The apron strings are tied in a knot at the small of her back, and the shears catch the light as she moves, and she doesn’t look back.

My hands start shaking exactly on schedule. Thirty seconds, and they stop.

But the place on my jaw where she touched me keeps going.

3

LAURELLE

He comes back the next morning.

The bell rings while I’m elbow-deep in a bucket of hydrangeas, separating stems that tangled overnight. When I look up, Dean is standing at the counter with two coffees. One black, one with honey.

“Lea said you take it with honey,” he says.

I pull my hands out of the water and dry them on my apron. “She’s right.”

He sets the cup on the counter and stays standing, and I realize he doesn’t have a reason to be here. The order is placed. The arrangement isn’t due until Friday. There’s nothing to discuss and nothing to decide, but he came anyway. And he brought coffee.

“I had a question about the flowers,” he says.

“Okay.”

“The ranunculus. Are those the ones that look like small roses?”

“Close. They’re rounder, with thinner petals. More layers.” I pull a stem from the cooler and hold it up for him. Pale pink, just starting to open, the outer petals soft and ruffled. “This is ranunculus.”

He takes it from me and turns it slowly between his thumb and forefinger, rotating the stem a quarter turn at a time. Each layer of petals gets its own pause. He’s reading the flower the same way he read my shop, and his hands are careful with it in a way that makes me aware of how large they are.

“She’ll like these,” he says.

“You could have called to ask me that.”

He looks up from the flower, holding my gaze for a second longer than he needs to. “I was already on the street.”

We both know the station is four blocks from here. We both know he walked those four blocks, stopped at Lea’s for two coffees, and asked how I take mine before he ever crossed the courtyard to my door. But I take a sip and let the lie stand because the coffee is good and I’m not ready for him to leave.